iPad Activities for the Election 2015

The General Election in the UK is fast approaching and many schools are using it as a theme in next term's lessons. I am beginning to map out a few activities I plan on carrying out with my classes next term using iPads.

Annotating Political Party Web-Sites using Explain EverythingExplain Everything allows you open up a web-browser within it. The annotation tools could then be used by pupils to highlight certain language styles and key words in political party websites that would be useful in their own campaign.Explain Everything can be found here https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/explain-everything/id431493086?mt=8&uo=4&at=11lIT4

QR Codes in Manifesto PostersPupils can create manifesto posters but to really connect with their audience they could add a QR codes with short sound bites. Croak It App allows pupils to record a 30 second audio clip which then creates a web-lnk. This could be attached to a QR Code generator such as http://www.qrstuff.com/

Pre-Campaign Voting and Election ResultsQuizzam is quick and easy polling app where the teacher can quickly take the answers from a multiple choice question. The results are shown as a graph. A vote could be taken prior to the campaigns and then again afterwards as a comparison of how effective each campaign has been.Quizzam can be found here https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/quizzam!/id529962644?mt=8&uo=4&at=11lIT4

“Teamwork makes the Dream work; and nobody knows that better than Millennials. There are a lot of different attributes that are associated with Millennials - some good and some not so good. Depending on who you’re talking to will determine what stereotype or attribute they’ll offer. Regardless of where you stand on your knowledge and/or perception of this generation, there is one generational trait that cannot and should not be ignored… and that’s COLLABORATION!

Happy New Year! After 2 weeks and 3 weekends, we are back in school. It was evident we had a little “brain drain” over the holidays. Hopefully we can catch up and get moving by the end of the week. After winter break is when we pick up speed and move full steam ahead.

One of the things I truly believe is that student engagement is dependent on their voice and choice in both the planning and execution of learning. When we include even the youngest of children in the process, we get so much more concentrated effort from them. This concept is the same for adults. Aren’t we usually voicing concern as educators how our voice needs to be heard in the decisions made on behalf of our students? When we are excluded from the process of decision making, we are less likely to buy into whatever it is we are being asked to do. We are also less likely to implement changes with fidelity.

European Innovation Academy is the world’s most intense startup bootcamp. We bring together the brightest minds from all over the world to bring innovative products and services to market. Entrepreneurs are immersed in multicultural and interdisciplinary teams for a 3-week hackathon.

Lots to get to grips with here, but well worth reading, not least for the differences between "Block Chain" and "Blockchain" the former a peer-to-peer technology, the latter an organisation). Also discussion on Bitcoins and the next generation social network - Ethereum. This is explained thus:

"Web 1.0 was dominated by large walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe. It sucked, but it provided an on-ramp for millions of non-geeks to consume content on the internet through these centralized providers. Web 2.0 is both social and transactional. Although Facebook is an enormous network, each user only partakes of their own decentralized hub of friends and preferred brands. And Amazon is “the everything store,” yet it is also a front for millions of vendors that use its network for marketing and distribution. The emerging distributed web 3.0 is computational in nature. Instead of a social graph calculated by a network like Facebook, or a commerce graph negotiated by Amazon, distributed networks allow individual nodes to calculate their relationship independently to other nodes."

As the industry attempts to figure out in what form factor wearables will first be useful, the Osterhout Design Group has come out with the R-7 Smartglass which comes with its own processor and a pair of 3D stereoscopic see-through HD displays.The device is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805

My Top 5 Lesson Activities using iPad of 2014 - December 2014 Post

As the year comes to an end I thought I would share some of my favourite iPad activities from this year. It was a difficult decision to narrow it down to five but here goes:

1.Towards the end of last year my school celebrated it's 150 year anniversary and we carried many activities with the pupils that term looking at the history of the school. One of the activities was to compare then and now photos. We use an app called InstaShake HD App https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/instashake-hd/id595411264?mt=8&uo=4&at=11lIT4 to blend two photos together in different ways. We also carried out this activity during the recent World War 1 week at the school.

2. Last term I worked with a PE department to use the iPads to support GCSE students portfolios. One of the activities was to record video of sporting skills from different angles using the iPad's camera and then add the videos into iMovie app to use some of it's features such as split screen, freeze frame and the speed tool. More detail on this can be found here http://sco.lt/8hTUhd ;

3. Early this term I began an activity with Year 6 pupils to gamify stories using Book Creator App We used the hyperlink tool within Book Creator to link text and images to different pages and give the reader options of where the story went by choosing options within a scenario. More detail can be found here http://www.redjumper.net/blog/2014/12/using-non-linear-stories-gamify-books/

4. In summer term I worked with a Year 3 class to use the time lapse feature in I Can Animate App https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/i-can-animate/id399760501?mt=8&uo=4&at=11lIT4 ; to capture shadows moving across the playground. We set the iPad up to take a photograph every minute from 9am-3pm. Recently Apple have added the time lapse tool into the iOS 8 camera, although you cannot adjust the time between photos like you can in I Can Animate.

5. A few months ago Comic Life 3 App https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/comic-life-3/id891378056?mt=8&uo=4&at=11lIT4 was released and within the many new templates is a newspaper front cover. We used this at school to firstly produce a weekly newspaper for the school news with Year 6 but also during World War 1 week to reproduce historical newspaper front pages of significant events during war.

A big thank you to all the great feedback to Teacher Guide to iPad App. Hearing how much it has helped teachers worldwide has made all the hard work worthwhile. The latest update brings a new icon, new categories of subjects and apps, a new design and 12 new ideas. Details can be found at www.ipadteachers.co.uk

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